Tools

About

My pics and thoughts from my first Adobe Max presentations.

Published:

I attended my first Max from October 5th through October 8th, I was blown away by the presentations! Here are some pictures I took pretty close to the action, with my comments below, please read the words to get a better feel for my reportage.

LA Convention Center in the early morning light on day 1

A full house before Keynote 1 at the Nokia theater

Some of the brilliant Adobe staff that make the magic happen.

CEO of Adobe, Shantanu Narayen spoke proudly about David Fincher's 'Gone Girl', the first major Hollywood film, shot in 6K whose entire post production including special effects and audio were done with Adobe Creative Cloud. They literally had an engineer parked at the studio, programming to the specs of the Editor, as and when editorial needs came up. These innovations are available to the entire post world.

SVP and GM of Adobe, the dapper David Wadhwani introducing all the new innovations in Creative Cloud. The main take aways for me were the integrated 'Creative Profile' that has all projects, assets, and settings saved in my profile synched across devices - any device I sign into with my Adobe ID has all my stuff associated with it. Incredible new mobile apps, the power of photoshop on a phone for instance! And the final piece - community, through Behance a network of 4 million users across the globe who I can connect with creatively.

Speaking of community, here is the Founder of Behance and celebrated author, Scott Belsky. Talking about exciting new technologies that make taking inspiration from the real world and integrating it into our digital landscapes seamless. Adobe Brush and Adobe Shape are just two of the amazing tools that allow you to create assets and vectors on mobile devices from inspirations in the real world.

CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella talking about the collaboration between Adobe and Microsoft that has led to amazing innovations in 'touch' workflows, that enable artists to work more organically with their hands using Adobe software like Illustrator and Photoshop to create art on mobile devices.

Satya Nadella and Shantanu Narayen on the power technology has put in the hands of creators. This was shortly before my Oprah moment when Satya Nadella announced that each of us were going home with a Surface Pro 3!

Day 2 of the Keynotes featured real world artists and this artist was my favorite. This is Ami Vitale, a world travelling, compassionate and empathetic photographer for National Geographic. Ami was truly inspiring! My favorite quotes by her, " The stories that unite us are more important than the stories that divide us." She also spoke about how we must be open and responsive to our surroundings, "Tunnel vision kills creativity, while empathy drives creativity."

Jason Seiler is an incredibly talented and humble artist who doesn't take himself too seriously, yet he is seriously gifted. He is an illustrator whose work has been featured in many major publications including his illustration of the Pope for Time Magazine's Person of the Year. He stressed, I don't use photogaphs, I create everything from scratch and you can see the results of his work are amazing. Adobe products help him to work faster and more efficiently.

Talented, funny, original and prolific artist Weird Al Yankovich was the third artist that was so fun to listen to! He is always creating, in so many different platforms. He tries many things but his sensibility is the same over many different forms. Love his individuality!

The final artist we met was the Director of the Award winning documentary 'Bully', Lee Hirsch. Lee's passion for his proejct and his mission of bringing the issue of bullying into mainstream consciousness was inspiring.

SVP at Adobe, Ann Lewnes presents the powerful, social action campaign initiated by Adobe 'The Bully Project Mural' that is bringing creatives across the globe, together to raise awareness about the rampant problem of bullying, one square art peice at a time.

SVP and GM, David Wadhwani urges creatives to get out there and create! "The world is a better place because of the work you do, we are here to provide you with the tools you need to challenge the norms and to help you connect with the community that encourages you to take the risks that you need to take." This call to action worked for me, I left feeling so inspired to DO, make mistakes and keep creating!

The man that started it all, Founder of Adobe John Warnock(right) and Member of the Board James E Daley(left).

Yes that's Jason Gordon-Levitt about 20 feet away from me! Love the amazing stuff he is doing with hitRECord. This was at the Sneaks presentation where engineers had about 5 minutes to share the work in progress with the audience. It was a blast to see all the amazing ideas, a few that stuck out for me were #De-fog, #Gap-stop, #project para, #time of day etc. Go google those!